Some records announce themselves with a fanfare. Others arrive quietly, almost apologetically, and then refuse to leave your head for a week. "My Life Is You," the debut single from Novo Grey, belongs firmly to the second camp — a song built not for spectacle but for staying power, and it earns that staying power through sheer emotional candour.

Loss makes strange architects. It tears down whatever you thought you'd built and leaves you standing in the rubble, wondering what to do with your hands. On their third record, Litvar's Rex Thurstan picks through that rubble with a Gibson J-45 and something like tenderness, and the result is the most persuasive thing this band has committed to tape.

Every so often a record arrives that refuses the tidy grammar of pop songwriting and insists on its own strange logic instead. "My Morbid Reverie" is one of those records — a single that behaves less like a hook-driven statement and more like a confession caught halfway between speech and dream.

Grief rarely announces itself with drama. More often it arrives as a kind of administrative oddity — the chair still pulled out at the same angle, the mug still hanging on its hook, the world stubbornly refusing to redecorate itself around a hole that's just appeared in it. Koen Ruiter, the Utrecht-trained songwriter who records as Koentakhinte, understands this instinctively, and "When You're Not Here" is built entirely from that understanding.

Four musicians who met over a decade ago in Seattle have finally made the record their whole career seemed to be circling. *Black Whole* is the sound of a band refusing to be pinned down, and refusing beautifully.

Romford is not, by any reasonable geographical measure, Nashville. And yet here comes Justin Vella, the self-styled Cockney Cowboy, striding out of a London council estate in a Stetson, determined to prove that heartbreak, nostalgia and a decent pedal steel line know no postcode. "Waterloo Road" is his calling card, and it is, against all sensible expectation, rather good fun.

Justin Kleiner has built himself a world, and on "New Misty Morning" he finally lets you through the gate. Awaywhere has always sounded like a place glimpsed rather than a project announced, and this single is the first properly furnished room in it: bright, humid, faintly unreal, the kind of morning you only get in dreams or in the opening credits of a film nobody remembers the plot of.

Pop music likes to pretend it doesn't have opinions. It dresses its arguments up in synth washes and four-on-the-floor kicks until the message slides past unnoticed, a spoonful of sugar for whatever the songwriter actually wants to say. Hans Petter Stormoen doesn't bother with the disguise. "Is It So Hard To Be Good" wears its thesis on its sleeve and dares you to skip past it, which is either a bold move or a foolish one, and happily it turns out to be the former.

Glasgow keeps producing them — voices that arrive fully formed, as if they'd been rehearsing in the wings for years before anyone thought to hand them a microphone. Ellijai, eighteen and already several singles into a career built on unflinching candour, has delivered with "Skinny Boyfriend" the most confident and gloriously unserious thing she's put her name to yet. This is a record that knows exactly what it wants — your attention, your hips, and ideally your heart rate up a notch — and gets it within the first thirty seconons of a synth line that arrives like a dare.

Daydreaming, as a subject for pop music, carries an obvious risk: nothing much happens. The mind wanders, the kettle boils, the bus arrives late, and somewhere behind the eyes a whole cinematic romance unfolds without anyone else noticing. Annika Bellamy has built a single around exactly that gap between the mundane and the imagined, and she's found a clever way to make the daydream itself the drama, rather than just the excuse for one.